Financial capability | RBS

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Supporting our colleagues

Protecting our colleagues

Financial capability

For RBS, supporting financial capability goes beyond delivering fair products and great service. It also means helping the customers of today and tomorrow to develop good money management skills, knowledge and behaviours, so they are empowered to make better financial decisions.

Supporting young people

MoneySense is our flagship financial education programme for young people aged between 5 and 18. Since we started over 22 years ago we have helped an estimated 4.5 million young people understand all about money giving them the skills they need to become competent consumers of the future. By the end of 2018 we will have helped a further one million young people.

Preventing financial difficulties

We know that things don’t always go to plan, and where possible we offer support to customers before they get into financial difficulties.

NatWest are proud to be a 2017 supporter of the Centre for Responsible Credit annual conference. This event plays a vital role in helping address financial inclusion and debt solutions.

NatWest is committed to supporting customers in financial difficulty. Our dedicated teams take the time to understand each customer situation. We make sure they understand the different forms of free and impartial money advice, and always offer to put customers directly through to specialist providers such as StepChange and Business Debtline if they require further support.

In 2016, we extended our innovative Citizens Advice partnership, where Citizens Advice colleagues are located within one of our Specialist Support teams providing independent generalist/debt advice to our most vulnerable customers. We have helped over 1,000 vulnerable customers since this partnership commenced in September 2015.

Our Social and Community Capital charity has provided around £4.3m social finance to personal community finance institutions (CDFIs). These organisations provide an affordable, community-led alternative to payday loans and work in some of the most under-served communities in the country.

In 2016, the Debt Management Operations team:

Helped 670,000 customers experiencing financial difficulty

Sent nearly 70,000 letters and had 51,000 conversations with customers, providing guidance on budgeting and signposting free debt advice agencies.

Provided more than 25,000 customers with ‘breathing space’, extra time for them to find support and to put in place a repayment arrangement.

Agreed mortgage repayment arrangements with over 23,000 customers, enabling them to get back on their feet.

Protecting customers’ money

Our Secure Banking Promise is our commitment to our customers – we’ll refund any money taken out of a customer’s account by a fraudster, as long as they’ve kept their security information secret.

We undertake a number of activities to protect customers' money:

NatWest’s free Rapport software helps our customers keep their home computers safe, and has been downloaded over 10.5 million times since 2008

We’re working in partnership with the police, local authorities, Trading Standards, social services, consumer groups to proactively stop fraud and scams from occurring.

NatWest is sponsoring the production of a British Standard Specification, aimed at helping the sector raise its standards in how we protect customers from fraud and scams.

We are an active member of the Home Office Joint Fraud Taskforce with representatives on all five work streams.

We are planning to support the industry wide 'Take 5' fraud awareness campaign with a range of customer awareness messages and events.

NatWest is the first bank to sponsor ‘Friends Against Scams’, the National Trading Standards Scams Team’s fraud and scams awareness initiative.

Our Investment Scams team received a 2016 Hero Award from National Trading Standards for protecting a customer from losing £1m in life savings to fraudsters